As I work to prepare matrices for Gold Open Access Journals 4, 2013-2018, before starting the second data pass next week (April 1), I find that I’m *definitely* planning some presentation changes, while keeping things as comparable to GOAJ3 as makes sense–but I’m also thinking that some additional changes might make it more useful and used.

The principles behind the planned and possible changes: to increase clarity and to increase the emphasis on articles and costs. That is: you can analyze percentages of no-fee gold OA journals in DOAJ easily enough, directly on DOAJ. What makes my research different is that I look at article counts–and on possible average cost per article for a grouping, which is far more meaningful than average fee per journal.

Already planned

Change “APC” to “Fee” throughout, and “Free” to “No-fee” (or “No fee” as appropriate). (Note that “Fee” includes submission and processing/publishing fees, and required society memberships if present. That’s always been true for “APC” in these reports.)

Replace the “Journals and articles” table that begins most discussions with a new “Key Facts” table that (a) drops the %Free column for journals (but retains %No-fee for articles), (b) adds a $/article column. (c) expands the table to show figures for each of the three segments as well as overall figures, (d) in most cases (excluding the first/overall occurrence), adds Rel% columns showing how this group’s percentages and $/art compare with overall figures. [Example: For Latin America in 2017, Article fee% is -75% relative to the universe, $/article is down 94%, and so on…]

There will be a chapter offering some comparisons of the four generations of DOAJ data.

Being considered (comments welcome!)

In most tables that currently show no-fee journal percentages as a column, drop that column and add a $/article column.

Comments welcome (for the next two weeks at least).

Example added [3/26/19]

To help visualize and consider these possible [probable] changes, I’ve generated a PDF consisting of three chapters [using the same Word template as last year]:

A “chapter” with a set of sample tables using all 2017 data (except in one case, where both the universe table and a table for Latin America appear)

Chapter 16, Latin America, from GOAJ3, unchanged.

Chapter 16, Latin America, with new tables and figures based on the changes discussed above. [Commentary has not generally been changed, and I haven’t moved tables to save space. If journal counts are different than those in the first Chapter 16–I haven’t checked–it’s because the new matrix is entirely consistent in using overall analyzed journal counts except where annual activity is clearly indicated; in some cases, the new journal count may be higher.]

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